Sentence to Ponder and Ponder and Ponder

Does any sentence better illustrate the human condition in all its political, social and biological complexities than this sentence?

New York state lawmakers have passed a bill banning residents from taking “tiger selfies” — a rising trend on dating websites in which single men post photos of themselves posing with the ferocious felines in hopes of impressing potential mates.

It could be a hobby. Some people collect stamps. Some people watch birds. Some people make eccentric comments on blog postings. Some people reply in a serious way to eccentric comments on blog postings.

“Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University, guards against demanding that every piece of work is paid. It can be ‘corrupting if you get into the mindset that you only do things for money,’ he says.”

Oh, it’s a doozy all right. Evolutionary Psychology is without question the single best predictor of human behaviour. But also, look at the divide between the state and the individual – I think Ev.Psych. tells us everything about econ. and politics too.

Evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories? Ask a population geneticist or evolutionary biologist to explain what he or she does, and you’ll see that evolutionary biology is based in theory, experimentation, and evidence just like any other investigative science.

The jury is still out on evo-psych but I think it will turn out to be a serious area of inquiry.

I’ll believe in evo-psych when there’s a human behaviour is *can’t* explain. Until that point, it’s utterly unfalsifiable.

(Sorry, but too many times I’ve simply seen E-P used to plausibly explain a micro-study that found behaviour A,and then used to plausibly explain a different micro-study that found behaviour not-A.

Its become clear that E-P satisfies our need for a good narrative – it *feels* right. But it does so because it’s *so* fuzzy and has thousands of interfering variables, which allows us to build an explanation for everything.

It’s plainly expressive speech, inane and pointless as it is, and the “compelling interest” in stopping such photographs is unclear; mere ‘safety’, as the alleged concern is, is untenable, given that the same speaker equally said bears are okay to pose with and touch.

(And of course, only “fairs and circuses” are covered. So wildlife parks or zoos? Or a private exotic animal being rented out? That’s all different. Because “safety”.)

What I see here is that the New York Assembly is, unsurprisingly, more concerned To Be Seen To Be Doing Something than anything else.

Well, there’s your dissertation topic right there: comparing the response rate for men on dating websites using tiger selfie profile pics vs those with regular selfies. I predict a modest but still measurable positive effect.

This raises equal protection issues if it also doesn’t prohibit tigers from taking selfies with GMU’s director of the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center.

The bill is aimed not at selfies, but the reckless practice of some animal exhibitors of having people interact or pose with the big cats in a very dangerous way. A long time ago I was bothered to see a theme park have children pose around a large tiger. Just ask Roy Horn what a tiger might suddenly do.